He was jealous and unfriendly, and he lost his temper easily. He wasn't very nice person, but he was one of the greatest scientific geniuses who has ever lived.

p4子供向けの伝記でこう書かれるなんてよっぽどだったんですかねｗ

No one thought the sickly baby would live, but he did. His father, also named Isaac, had died three months before his son's birth. He had been a well-off farmer, but he couldn't read or write --- not even enough to sign his name.

p6well-off 裕福な天才ってときどき突然生まれるものなのですね。

Starting in a bakery, it burned for three days. Most people managed to escape, but 80 percent of the buildings in London were ruined. Although no one knew it, the plague was carried by rats and fleas. By destroyed all the filthy old buildings where the rats lived, the fire may have helped end the plague.

Newton was often so busy thinking that he would forget whether or not he had eaten. The rumor at Cambridge was that his cat got fat from the meals Newton left sitting on his table. He slept only a few hours a night and often not in his bed.

p55猫ww

The Royal Society thought the best way to advance knowledge was to discuss ideas, so each man could build on --- or knock down --- what the others were thinking. Their motto was Nullius in verba, which means roughly, "Don't take anyone's word for it."

p59議論することが進歩させる一番の方法で、モットーは「そのまま信じるな」なんですね。

Clubs like the Royal Society were springing up all over in Newton's time. This period is often called the Age of Enlightenment. Enlightenment means learning the kind of important knowledge that changes the way people think. The great scholars of the time believed in working together. They wanted to deal with issues of all kinds using reason, logic, and observation --- not superstition or religion.

p59enlightenment 悟り、(18 世紀のヨーロッパ、特にフランスでの主義的)啓蒙運動

Newton spent even more time and energy on alchemy than he did on ordinary science. His servant reported that Newton often sat up all night in his private lab at Cambridge, bent over a roaring fire, working on mysterious experiments.

p69

After Newton died, the Royal Society discovered he had written over a million words about alchemy. They were so embarrassed by this that they marked the papers "not fit to be printed." Newton's writings about alchemy were not published until 2004.

p70そんな最近まで。

Newton also created his three laws of motion. He had learned the first law from Galileo. It says that if something is moving, it will keep moving until something makes it stop. If something is sitting still, it won't move until some force makes it move.The second law shows how much force is needed to make something move or stop moving. The final law says that, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." This means that every time you push on something, it pushes back just as strongly, but in the opposite direction.

p80

For years, counterfeiters had been clipping bits of silver off the edges of coins to make new coins. By Newton's time, much of England's money was worth less than it was supposed to be. The government had to do something. They decided on the Great Recoinage of 1696. The Mint collected all the clipped coins and remade them into a new form of coin. These coins had ridged edges, so they were harder to fake. Newton oversaw the whole thing. He did such a good job that in 1699 he was promoted to Master of the Mint. He stayed in this position for almost thirty years, until he died.

Once the Great Recoinage was done, Newton turned his attention to catching counterfeiters. He made himself into a kind of detective with a network of spies and informers. His greatest triumph was the capture of the clever counterfeiter named Chaloner. Newton pursued him for years and finally succeeded in having him executed.

p89執念深い。

For the next two hundred years, almost all physics had its roots in his ideas. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did another great genius --- Albert Einstein --- discover the limits of Newton's discoveries. In day-to-day life, however, people rarely have to deal with situations where Newton's physics doesn't make sense. It's still the way we understand the world.

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Whether we are riding a bicycle, catching a baseball, or dropping an apple, most of us most think of movement in terms we learned from that strange, bad-tempered, brilliant loner Isaac Newton.